What’s broken now? A retrospective

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Once again, a lot has happened since the last post. When I had written last, the server had been mostly figured out, leaving the cli for tweaking and the frontend for building.

The frontend ended up being a lot tricker than I thought, and about as hacky as I expected. I had to figure out how to get server side generation working to have a somewhat static website, which would help tremendously with SEO and load times. I also had to just learn next.js, which wasn’t bad in and of itself, but:

1. I’m unfamiliar with anything other than React basics, and
2. I used the ‘app router’ rather than the older, more well-documented ‘pages router.’ This meant that most code snippets I found in my countless google searches weren’t useful for the new ‘app router’ system, making the learning process more complicated.

Once the frontend barely started to work, with proper data revalidation and SSG, I had to do some pretty heavy tweaks to how the CLI was handling things, which was surprising, as I had figured it would be the most straightforward part. I had to make sure that metadata was being properly generated, updated, and parsed upon post uploads, and I also had to mess around with intercepting links for images and files, so that once a post was uploaded, the corresponding assets were accessible too, regardless of where they were on the client machine.

Finally, the largest hurdle that I have just cleared within hours of writing this post has been dockerizing the whole server side. I’m pretty familiar with docker and how it works from a conceptual level, but I had never had the opportunity to use docker compose, or really mess around with custom Dockerfiles. It was a lot of reading, but it was honestly an interesting process altogether.

There is still much that could be done, such as a web interface for posts, an Nginx proxy for SSL, better parsing/styling for posts (at this point it’s basically just pure CSS despite the usage of Tailwind everywhere else), and more, but as of now I’ve created the first fully working version of bloggen, both client and server.

Cheers to that! And cheers to this.